Auckland has always had fragmented ownership of its bus companies. Howick and Eastern have been operating as an independent private company since 1939, Birkenhead Transport for not much less than that. Plus back a few years before I started catching buses there was the Whenuapai bus company. Urban Express have appeared in recent times too, although the major player has remained as (until very recently) Stagecoach. As far as I know, Stagecoach came into being when our stupid city council sold off the buses in the early 1990s. A couple of years ago Stagecoach (a Scottish company actually) sold their business to NZ Bus, a branch of Infratil (an New Zealand company, thankfully. So we’re in a situation where there are five bus companies operating across Auckland.
Now this wouldn’t necessarily have to be a problem, as overseas you also find highly fragmented ownership of bus service operators. Ideally, it would be great for the ARC to just buy out the lot of them, considering it spends a huge chunk of its money subsidising these companies anyway. However, in reality the situation has turned into a bit of a nightmare, which seems to have actually got worse in recent times (as I’ll mention soon). Each bus company has its own ticketing system, and each ticketing system is largely incompatible with everything else. There is an all-ecompassing ticket for monthly and daily unlimited travel across any of the bus companies (and also the train & ferries). However, this ticket is prohibitively expensive for most people and as a result is hardly used. This situation is particularly annoying for me, as it just so happens that Urban Express operate the route between home and work for me, however all routes from either of these two places to the city are operated by NZ Bus. This means I generally have to worry about ensuring I have change for the bus, a right pain in the ass.
Integrated ticketing, the solution for this mess, seems to have been on the radar as a goal for those trying to hammer our public transport system into shape for a long time now. I think just about every ARTA report includes some sort of reference to “exploring integrated ticketing options” or “advocating for integrated ticketing.” This seems to have been the case for about 10 years now, as before ARTA was coming up with these broad goals, other agencies were also harping on about it. For a long time I couldn’t get my head around why on earth this was so difficult. I mean how hard is it to get the bus (and train for that matter) companies to sort out something that will surely benefit them all through increasing the ease of use for the system and therefore its attractiveness to users? The lack of progress had me beating my head against a wall. Grand plans for “electronic smart-card ticketing” began to emerge, although it really seemed like an overly gold-plated solution to a problem that surely could be solved tomorrow through adopting a simple paper ticket system.
Interestingly, in recent times I have got my head around why ARTA just wasn’t achieving anything with regards to integrated ticketing. Furthermore, the main impediment seems to have finally been solved due to Public Transport Management Bill. In effect, when public transport was deregulated in the early 90s (geez we have the early 90s to blame for a lot) the laws which governed how public transport would operate split routes into commercial one and subsidized ones. Commercial routes (generally peak hour ones) were operated by whatever bus company got in first, the operator wouldn’t be subsidised at all for operating this route and would be able to do whatever they liked with it (regarding the quality of bus etc.). ARTA (and its predecessors) would be required to subsidise the routes operators deemed non-profitable. ARTA has more say in what goes on as it’s basically paying the bus company to run the service. This system has ended up being utterly hopeless, most typified by Auckland’s enormous drop-off in per-capita use of public transport since the early 90s when the original legislation came into being. Even in recent years as bus patronage has increased again, this increase has generally been less than the rate of population growth. Most patronage increase on public transport in the last few years has been on the rail system.
Bringing this back to ticketing, what the previously legislation appeared to do was make it impossible for ARTA to force the bus companies into doing anything on the commercial routes. The bus companies were more keen on protecting “their patch” than actually growing the system through integrated ticketing, and so weren’t keen on allowing integrated ticketing on the commercial routes. My understanding is that ARTA could have forced them into accepting integrated ticketing on subsidised routes – but what’s the point of having a situation where an integrated ticket is OK on the 9.20am bus, but not OK on the 9.10am bus – even though both are operated by the same company and also along the same route. Although the effects of the Public Transport Management Bill won’t be fully felt for a while yet, as contracts will need to expire and be renewed before ARTA really has more power, but my general understanding is that ARTA now has as much power over commercial routes as it does over subsidised routes. And, in general, it has more power over both types of routes than it did before. To simplify, without the Public Transport Management Bill ARTA could have never had the power to make integrated ticketing happen, but with the new laws it can.
It seems that these extra powers are coming just in the nick of time too. Until fairly recently, although NZ Bus had bought out Stagecoach they had continued to use their brand and logos on all their buses. I think there was some agreement in the sale that this could happen for a few years. However, instead of just renaming all the buses “Bus Auckland” or something logical like that, NZ Bus has decided to split things into four, and create GoWest for West Auckland buses, NorthStar for buses on the North Shore, MetroLink for buses that operate within the isthmus area, and the soon to be launched Waka Pacific buses for South Auckland. Now some of these buses look pretty cool, but geez we’ve gone from having five bus companies to what seems like eight. Without proper integrated ticketing, a traveller needs to know that NorthStar tickets are OK on Metrolink services but not OK on Urban Express, GoWest tickets are OK on Waka Pacific but not OK on Ritches… the whole thing is insane! I can’t quite comprehend myself why NZ Bus has done this. The official reason is that they wanted the bus companies to connect to their local communities a bit better. Maybe they saw that Birkenhead Transport and Howick and Eastern buses have been fairly successful by sticking to their patch over the years. Maybe they wanted to create confusion, so that people use cash fares (more expensive than pre-paid fares) more often so they make more money? It just seems illogical really.
I suppose that once integrated ticketing actually happens then this won’t matter anymore. If any pre-paid ticket can be used on any bus service then it won’t matter how many different coloured buses are out there. But for now, I think it’s just stupid.
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